Slow news week, huh?
Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse gets front-page play for "Women Suddenly Scarce Among Justices' Clerks."
There's even a banner graphic after the jump, "The Justices and Their Law Clerks," which does the affirmative action-style bean-counting, ranking the justices based on the percentage of female law clerks each has hired since 2000.
"Some speculated that Justice Antonin Scalia, who hired only two women among 28 law clerks during the last seven years and who will have none this year, could not find enough conservative women to meet his test of ideological purity. (Justice Clarence Thomas will also have no female clerks this year, but over the preceding six years hired 11.)"
In the next paragraph, without a trace of irony, she talks to that well-known centrist justice (to the Times, anyway) Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who laments the lack of female clerks. Before becoming a federal judge, the liberal Ginsburg was director of the ACLU Women's Rights Project. No "ideological purity" there?